Anyone who has ever suffered
under the tyranny of a strategic
plan will gain a momentary
sense of relief from reading
The Social Labs Revolution, by Zaid Hassan.
The author delivers relief when he points
out how limited such plans are as a way to
solve problems. “These planning-based
approaches—so common across government,
civil society, and even business—represent a neo-Soviet paradigm, one that
is spectacularly out of step with what we
now know about complexity, about systems,
about networks, and about how change happens,”
Hassan writes The relief is fleeting,
however, because the social lab process that
Hassan introduces in his book is as messy
and uncertain as the problems that he uses
it to address.

Social labs offer an alternative approach
not just to planning but also to implementation.
The approach, as Hassan describes
it, is emerging from work done by scholars
and by leaders of several consulting firms.
(Hassan is cofounder of Reos, a social innovation
consultancy.) It has intellectual and
practical roots in fields such as participatory
practice, community organizing, developmental
evaluation, and design thinking. A
social lab approach brings together intentionally
diverse teams of stakeholders and
gives them time to experiment and to iterate
solutions. It also deliberately makes experts
uncomfortable. In recounting the work of
one lab, Hassan offers this anecdote: “One
senior EU advisor, on being told that she had
to ‘suspend judgment,’ asked in disbelief,
‘For thirty years, I’ve been paid to exercise
my judgment, and you want me to stop?’”

The groups that constitute each lab come
together not around a project but around
a shared problem. They work through a
facilitated process of discovery in which
they identify points of agreement and areas
of potential intervention. The process then
relies on rapid experimentation and external
feedback—practices that blur the line
between planning and implementation in
a useful way. The goal is to try things out
at a scale that’s large enough to produce informative
results, but not so grand that the
risks of implementation become too large
for stakeholders to bear.

Hassan draws on several examples to
illustrate the iterative nature of the social
lab process. The Sustainable Food Lab, for
example, is a multi-year effort to find ways
to provide healthy, safe food for an ever-expanding
global human population. Hassan
tells the story, warts and all, of the lab’s efforts
to try out various sustainable solutions,
including fisheries, smallholder farms, and
responsibly grown commodities. He shows
that participants struggled to find points of
agreement with their peers, and that they
were unprepared to make positive use of
external critique. (It’s clear that the external
stakeholders in this case hadn’t been trained
to offer constructive criticism; rather, they
were primed to tear down ideas.) At the
same time, he uses this story to illustrate
what social labs can produce.

Central to the social lab model is the idea
that experimentation is different from a pilot
program. That might seem like just a substitution
of one kind of jargon for another.
But Hassan’s analysis of initiatives like the
Sustainable Food Lab makes that idea real.
Along the way, Hassan highlights several
core principles of this model: the need for
diversity among stakeholders, the value of
using conflict productively, and the benefit
of having the freedom—and the funding—to
experiment and to make mistakes.

The idea of applying messy solutions to
messy problems has an agreeable symmetry.
Our shared social problems involve a
multiplicity of actors, forces, institutional
agendas, and status-quo interests that will
work against change at all cost. Making
progress is bound to be messy. Failure will
happen. Steps forward won’t occur without
a few steps backward as well. Hassan
lays out these challenges with commendable
honesty. The Social Labs Revolution is
a refreshing, well-written call to arms for
matching knotty problems with less-than neat
processes, and for confronting complex
issues with complex thinking.

Hassan notes that the social lab model is
still under development—that the approach
itself is emergent and iterative. (The title of
his last chapter is “Next-Generation Social
Labs.”) After a decade or so of developing
this approach, he and his colleagues can point
to successes large and small. They’re also
actively involved in learning from their failures
and in improving the social lab process.

Much of Hassan’s social lab experience,
and several of his examples, relate to work
that he did for a consulting firm called
Generon. I got a very clear sense that the
methods of Generon—its U-shaped process,
for example—were not available for public
sharing. Hassan’s descriptions of those
methods are more obtuse than they need
to be. That vagueness is the least helpful
aspect of this otherwise promising book.
Having convincingly shown that there’s a
better way to work toward shared solutions,
Hassan doesn’t provide enough detail to help
readers figure out how to follow that path.
Those who look to this book for a turnkey
alternative to strategic planning will find
their hopes raised and then dashed. They
will be more certain than ever that linear
planning doesn’t work, but they won’t come
away with the tools needed to apply a social
lab method.